Workers Think Automation Would Boost Productivity

Employees spend less than half of their day doing the job they were hired to do, according to a recent survey from Workfront. The fourth annual "State of Enterprise Work" report indicates that attending time-wasting meetings, fielding excessive emails and taking unexpected phone calls account for far too much of the day. But productivity is also restricted because workers are constantly limited to traditional and often outdated office tools, such as old email systems, spreadsheets or even handwritten to-do lists. However, they believe that with automation, at least one-fifth of their tasks could be handed over to a machine. With this, they're convinced they'd have more time to be innovative and to complete primary work functions. "Forward-looking companies must recognize today that tomorrow's enterprise work cannot be executed via yesterday's email and spreadsheets," according to the report. "Tomorrow's solutions must automate the manual work of organizing, communicating and reporting on work and provide the right data at the right time so human knowledge workers can do their best work, faster than ever before." As a somewhat humorous finding, the report includes the most overused office buzz words or phrases, and we've included those here. More than 2,000 employees took part in the research, which was conducted by Regina Corso Consulting.